Purgatory
by Known Unknowns
Summary: Gregory House had been dead for one year, officially. To himself, he's been dead for seven months, at least in all of the ways that matter. References to Chirteen. Oneshot.


**Purgatory**

_A/N I: It's been one year. I honestly cannot believe it's been one entire year since we said goodbye to House and the gang. This fic is a tribute to the fandom that got me writing fanfiction and the show that taught me everything about life that my parents didn't. This will probably be the last thing I write for House, other than updating my multi-chapter fics. So... here we go._

_A/N II: This follows in line with my fics "Enjoy Yourself" and "Talk It Out", but reading those two isn't necessarry to understand this one._

_Disclaimer: I do not own House MD, nor do I make any profit from this story._

* * *

Robert Chase didn't think that he'd ever get sick of that feeling. That stirring in his chest that he got, the warmth that spread through him when he saw her sleeping peacefully next to him, her hair spread out around her head like a blonde halo. He liked her hair when it was light brown, but he didn't mind it blonde. If he woke up before her, on the days that she doesn't do yoga before work, he's content to just lay there, propped up on his arm watching her.

He tried to treasure every moment that he had with her, because he knew that it couldn't last forever. He had known that from the start with her. She had been born with an expiration date stamped on her foot, and it was thirty years earlier than the usual person's. He was going to lose her. He was going to watch her die, and somewhere along the lines he had promised to kill her himself, now that House was gone.

Someday, her illness would put both of them through the kind of pain neither of them had ever felt before. But for now, they were fairly young. If they were lucky, they'd have a year or two, maybe even three before the symptoms started. Another year before they became so bad that she could no longer live her life. They still had time, short thought it may be.

He never thought that she would come back. He thought that she would live with her girlfriend, away from the medical world, happy as she could be until the end of her days. Yet, after Wilson's funeral, she approached him. She wanted her old job back, and apparently her and her partner had split. Taub had resigned, intent on taking a job at New York Mercy that required less hours from him and allowed him more time with his children, so it was currently just himself, Park, and Adams in diagnostics.

He accepted her back with open arms. They formed a habit of getting dinner together after work, discussing the case, and sometimes even talking about themselves, though it took him a long time to get her to open up. Eventually, though, he finally managed to get past the wall that was Thirteen, the woman who preferred to be called by a number, and was able to see the person underneath - Remy Hadley.

He doesn't know when he fell in love with her, but he guesses that it was sometime after their dinners stopped ending at the restaurant and started ending the next morning. Hell, he doesn't even know specifically _why_ he fell in love with her. But he did, and for the first time since Cameron had left him, he felt love. After two months of the trysts that she never seemed inclined to talk about after they occurred, he told her in no uncertain terms that he wanted more.

This time, it was she who accepted the offer with open arms. He can honestly say he'd never been happier. He had the job he'd always aspired to, his friends, a woman whom he loved... things were good. Functional, almost. He never thought anything at Princeton Plainsboro could be anything but chaos.

He supposed that when House died and Wilson left, they took all of the chaos with them. Sometimes he missed it. He missed House a lot. A lot more than he thought he would, anyway. He kept the diagnostician's red coffee cup and overlarge tennis ball as keep sakes. He couldn't help but think every time he sat in the Eames chair that House would kill him for sitting in his favorite spot. Even now, one year after his death, he still expected him to walk through the door and ask him why the hell he wasn't blowing up the patient's heart or some other kind of insanity.

Looking back, he had a mentor in House. The man didn't really teach him, he simply learned. He learned how to be a doctor, how to make the decisions that defined who you were as a man and as a medical practitioner. He owed the man, that was undeniable.

He visited House's grave when he could. He visited Wilson's as well, when the oncologist followed his friend into the dark. He talked to them, told them what was happening at the hospital and in his life. He missed House, because he realized now that the grizzled older doctor was the closest thing he'd ever had to a father, ridiculous as it may seem. His only regret was that he didn't tell him that before he died.

* * *

Lisa Cuddy would be the first to admit that she had never really known what she wanted out of life. Warring desires had always been at her core. What did she really want, what did she need? A family? A career? Love? She'd tried desperately to find and hold onto all three, and now, at age forty four, she thought she had gotten fairly close.

She was Dean of Medicine at Scarsdale. It was a much smaller hospital than PPTH, and allowed her a little more time at home with Rachel, who was now five. She had a steady boyfriend of nine months, Dr. Lyle Warner, an ophthalmologist that had been hired on shortly after she became Dean.

Things were... good. Or at least they should have been. They were simple. She had never realized how overly complex her life had been until she was on the other side of the fence. Lyle didn't play mind games with her. Lyle didn't make her wonder what he was capable of, she doesn't have to constantly worry about where he is, what he's doing, when he'd snap. He was pleasant, predictable, and safe.

She was bored to tears. She hated to admit it, but she found herself missing the insane bastard that had nearly killed her and plowed his car into the side of her house. Because there was never a dull moment with House. Because he kept her on her toes, he made her life exciting. Now, she was stagnant, and she had every right to be happy - she should be happy.

But she wasn't, and that drove her fucking mad.

* * *

Eric Foreman wasn't the kind of man who ignored his instincts. He learned a long time ago from a certain grouchy cripple that your gut is one of the few things in the world that you can actually trust. When he found House's ID propping up the table in his office, he knew. He simply knew.

There were other clues, too. When he went over the autopsy report, he could see that the dimensions of the corpse didn't quite match up with House's. The burnt body was paunchier, shorter. Yes, the fire could have warped the skeletal structure, but it still didn't resemble House's physique at all. Secondly, Wilson looked way too happy when he came by to finish cleaning out his office to have just legitimately lost his best friend. That, along with the ID and the fact that House's last patient, a heroin addict, had been reported missing, he had started to jump to conclusions.

When he double-checked the dental records, he knew for sure. House was not dead - he was very much alive, and if Foreman had been a betting man, he would have put all of his money on House being with Wilson. That fact, strangely, made him very happy. House had managed to escape the law so he could spend the last five months with his best friend. What he did after that... who knew?

He gave up everything for his best friend. It was so... un-House. He decided that maybe he had misjudged the man he had been so frequently accused of being exactly like. Upon seeing what he did for Wilson, he decided that being like House wasn't that bad.

His life was where he wanted it, and that's about all he could say for it. He ran the hospital, and in his opinion and in the opinion of his superiors, he did a damn good job of it. However, no matter how successful he was professionally, no matter how nice the house he recently bought was, and no matter how much money he had in his bank account, he was alone. He slept alone, he returned to an empty home every night, and he had no one. He grabbed a beer with Chase a couple nights a week when he wasn't with Thirteen, and that was it. Chase, who was madly in love with the only woman he ever could have seen himself marrying, of being with forever.

He'd become much more like House than he ever thought he would be. Bitter and alone, gifted with hyper intelligence, an illustrious career, only one friend to his name and completely miserable. He thought he might always be miserable, but he might as well try and do something right instead of just wallowing in his own self-pity.

He would do his job. He would see to it that the people who come into this hospital seeking treatment left better than when they came. He may be House-light, as Cuddy had deemed him, but he could do things that the older doctor could not. He would make a difference, and that, at the very least, was a comfort to him.

* * *

Allison Cameron had never depended on happy endings. She never expected one, either. Had she hoped for one? Sure, but who doesn't? Everyone hopes for a light at the end of the tunnel, everyone wants the wedding, the baby in a baby carriage, the perfect man, perfect job, and nice little suburban house with a dog and a white picket fence to top it all of. People want contentment.

Somewhere along the lines, she had found happiness. Chicago held for her something that she had searched for her entire life - fulfillment. She didn't want a facade of happiness, she wanted to feel that lightness in her chest, to wake up every morning and not have to weigh the pros and cons of getting out of bed. When she had started in Chicago, with the support of her family, she was able to move on past what had happened in Princeton with Chase.

She met Oliver Harrow, a surgeon at Chicago General who had charmed her almost instantly. He had thick dark hair that hung in his eyes, an easy smile, and two bright green eyes that never failed to captivate her attention. He was kind, compassionate, and had an identical sense of humor to her own. She fell for him fast and hard. A year after moving away from Princeton, they married. Nine months later, they gave birth to their son Aaron David Harrow.

When she held the small bundle wrapped in a blue blanket in her arms, she finally found it. Fulfillment. She was happy, happier than she had ever been. Somehow, she had escaped Princeton Plainsboro Teaching Hospital and had managed to have a happy life. House had not permanently tainted her and doomed her to misery. No, she had gotten everything she wanted.

Sometimes, though, she still missed the insanity of working as a fellow in diagnostics. She missed the brilliant and infuriating man she had been in love with, and the one she had thought she had been in love with. She missed Foreman, she missed Wilson, even Cuddy... but that was a part of her life that had passed. It had held her worst days and her best days, but it was done.

She had finally learned one of the only lessons that House hadn't taught her. If you want a happy ending bad enough... sometimes, you actually get it.

* * *

Gregory House had been dead for one year, officially. To himself, he's been dead for seven months, at least in all of the ways that matter. In reality, he was still breathing, and that fact never ceased to frustrate and amaze him. Because he'd used up his nine lives. Because he should be buried six feet under.

But he made a promise, and he was a lot of things. Narcissistic, misanthropic, self-destructive... he'd long forgotten how far his laundry list of flaws extended. Was there any point in keeping track anymore? No one was there to psycho analyze him, to remind him of those things. He was a lot of things, but he was still a man of his word.

He had been living in purgatory for six months, two weeks, three days, thirteen hours, and forty-three minutes. He didn't really know why he was keeping track. Maybe somewhere, in the part of his mind that was still sane, he found it comforting - comforting to know that time was still moving along without him, that the earth was still spinning.

In Mayfield, it felt quite a bit like it did when he was in prison. Like his life had been put on repeat, like he was living the same day over and over again. Only here, instead of gang members and murderers, he was surrounded by people who's level of damage almost rivaled his own. Almost.

Here, they offered him platitudes. They offered him hope. They offered him all the help he could get, in the form of therapy, in the form of many multicolored pills that he had no intention of ever taking. He stopped taking drugs a long time ago, and he won't start again, even if they'll supposedly help him.

It's not like last time he was in the mental ward. He wasn't reprimanded for missing the group therapy sessions. He wasn't scolded for refusing to take his medicine. He didn't know if it was because maybe they're a little bit afraid of him, or maybe it was because Nolan just ordered them to leave him the hell alone. If the second was true, he was grateful. He avoided social situations like the plague. In Mayfield, you received only one look from the staff. Pity.

He'd changed a lot, but he still hated being pitied. He didn't need their pity, and he didn't deserve it. That's why he stayed in his room most of the day, talking to the hallucination of Wilson that he knew wasn't real. The hallucination that caused him to be in the mental facility in the first place.

He left for meals, sometimes. Sometimes he didn't feel like he can eat at all. If he tried to swallow something, it immediately came back up. He hated those days.

At three o'clock, every single day like clockwork, he went to Nolan's office. A lot of the time, he just sat there. The psychologist didn't press him. He'd learned over the months that luring him out of his catatonic state was nearly impossible. So, he stopped trying.

On occasion, he talked. On those days, Nolan took the advantage and tried to pry as much out of his as humanly possible. Sometimes it just caused him to shut back down. Other days, he found himself actually being expressive about how he feels. Maybe it was because keeping everything inside of himself for so long had begun to wear on him. Maybe he just liked the sound of his own voice.

Once in awhile, Nolan would bring him an interesting case file that landed on one of his friend's desks. The patient was already cured, but the diagnosis wasn't included. He'd sit there for a few hours, brainstorming theories, asking questions about the patient, probing into their personal life as much as he can with the thin amount of information he's provided.

Those were his best days, now.

No one knew that he was in Mayfield. Nolan, as a favor to him, admitted him under a false name. As far as the world is concerned, he's just as dead as his best friend. He's okay with it that way. Sometimes, he wishes that on visiting day someone would be waiting there for him, but he knew it was better for him to be alone.

After all, if he was alone, he can't lose anyone else.

He looked out the window onto the grounds. Spring had visited New Jersey, and he liked the sound of the new green leaves brushing against each other, the lush look of the grass surrounding the psychiatric hospital. He hadn't left Mayfield since he was admitted. He'd only been outside once or twice in his stay here. He just didn't have the energy anymore. He didn't know if he was getting old, or if he'd just lost his will to do much of anything other than continue existing.

He was in purgatory. He was alive, and he was breathing, and that's about all he could say for his life. He'd been empty for so long he couldn't really feel at all anymore. He wasn't happy. He wasn't miserable. He wasn't anything, except for maybe lost.

He would keep living, though. He would carry on. Because he made the man that he loved a promise, and he wasn't going to break it. He was still a man of a word.


End file.
